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Ronald Reagan, Hollywood star turned political force, swept into office as the 40th US president in 1981 on a flag-waving conservative revival that changed America's political and economic landscape.

Reagan, who died today at 93 after a long struggle with Alzheimer's disease, was a genial optimist and maestro of a simple - critics said too simple - creed promising lower taxes, less government, a powerful national defence and unabashed patriotism.

That might sound familiar against a succeeding parade of conservative leaders from Newt Gingrich to George W Bush, but as a governing credo it was bold and new when Reagan began a turbulent White House reign marked by economic resurgence, the collapse of Soviet communism, vast budget deficits, an assassination attempt and a scandal or two.

Early in his political rise, analysts laughed him off as a shallow show-business buffoon, all grin and pompadour. One high-ranking Democrat, Clark Clifford, dismissed him as an "amiable dunce".

But Reagan's crystal-clear convictions and sunny manner captivated voters tired of blurry, indecisive politicos. And Reagan marched steadily upward from popular ideologue to California governor to two-term Republican president from 1981 to 1989 - a force from the right such as modern America had never seen.

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If sabre-rattling Senator Barry Goldwater made conservative hearts flutter in the 1960s at the prospect of their own president, his philosophy of "extremism in defence of liberty" frightened off middle-of-the-road and liberal voters.

But the die of the conservative revolution in American politics had been cast with Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign, and Reagan became the answer to conservative prayers.

Fifteen years later, Reagan became the first right-wing president in 50 years; the first in 30 years to serve two terms; the first ever to spend a trillion dollars on peacetime defence, the first to hold five US-Soviet summits or witness a doubling of the national debt.

A conservative hero

He made his conservative successors politically possible. Historians may long argue his proper rank among US presidents - great or not? - but few would contest that he was a leader who left a deep imprint, grudgingly admired even by opponents and revered by millions.

Reagan left the presidency more popular than any predecessor, despite the Iran-Contra scandal that marred his last years in office. And when he passed the mantle to protege George H W Bush in January 1989, it was with a sweeping farewell boast typical of his glowing self-confidence.

"We meant to change a nation and instead we changed a world," he said as he and his adoring wife, Nancy, headed for retirement in Los Angeles' swank Bel-Air district.

Even when stricken by the disabling Alzheimer's disease in 1994 - a disease that confined him to final years of seclusion, not even able to recognise his wife - Reagan disclosed it in a "My fellow Americans" letter brimming with upbeat faith in the future.

"When the Lord calls me home ... I will leave with the greatest love for this country of ours and eternal optimism for its future," he said in the letter released on November 5, 1994. "... I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead."

Three days later, Americans illustrated the enduring allure of the conservative credo he espoused by putting Republicans in full control of Congress for the first time in 40 years.

As president, however, Reagan was in fact a paradox.

He railed against federal spending but followed policies - twinning a vast military buildup with tax cuts - that more than doubled the total national debt and left succeeding presidents and Congresses to deal with the consequences.

He abhorred bargaining with hostage-takers and called for an arms boycott against states accused of fomenting terrorism. But he also sold arms to Iran in a clandestine operation that mushroomed into the gravest scandal of his presidency.

He built a career on fiery anti-communist rhetoric and Kremlin-bashing, but developed an affection for Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the course of five summit meetings.

His meeting with Gorbachev in Moscow in 1988 typified the ironies that made Reagan such a fascinating public figure for so long. Here was America's best-known anti-communist, the man who called the Soviet Union an "evil empire", doing business in the Kremlin with the political heir of Lenin on a chummy "Ron" and "Mikhail" basis.

It was Reagan being Reagan: accepting compromise and doing business while still proclaiming the patriotic conservative cause, just as he has done all his political life.

Evil Empire

Asked if he still saw the Soviet Union as the "evil empire," he retired his famous phrase without a flinch. "No," he said, "I was talking about another time, another era."

He and Gorbachev put into force a treaty banning intermediate-range missiles, the first to abolish an entire class of nuclear weapons.

Many traced the collapse of the Soviet Union a few years later in part to the economic stress of trying to compete with Reagan's relentless US military buildup.

He left office two weeks shy of his 78th birthday in 1989, by far the oldest president America had ever had.

It was typical of the amazing physical resilience he had shown in office, surviving a 1981 assassination attempt that put a bullet near his heart, a 1985 colon cancer operation and 1987 prostate and skin-cancer surgery.

In his last years he slipped further into his own world as Alzheimer's took its toll. Eventually he failed to recognise old friends or even recall he had been president. Physical frailties followed - he broke a hip in a fall at home in January 2001 - and his beloved second wife, Nancy, became his primary care-giver in their home in Los Angeles' exclusive Bel-Air district.

She called Alzheimer's a "long goodbye", and in a rare public speech last May she called for stem cell research, saying "Ronnie's long journey has finally taken him to a distant place where I can no longer reach him".

She added that, because of this, stem cell research was needed to "save other families from this pain".

Career in Hollywood movies

Ronald Wilson Reagan was born on February 6, 1911, in Tampico, Illinois, the second son of Jack and Nellie Reagan.

His father was an itinerant salesman and a heavy drinker, barely able to eke out a living for his wife and two children as the family moved from one small Midwestern town to another.

After graduation from Eureka College in 1932, Reagan became a radio sportscaster known throughout the Midwest as "Dutch". More than 60 years later, that moniker provided the ironic title for a highly controversial, Reagan-authorised biography by historian Edmund Morris.

Reagan headed for Hollywood and a career in films in the midst of the Great Depression years. He made 51 movies from 1937 to 1964, mostly B-grade comedies and romances. He co-starred with a chimpanzee in "Bedtime for Bonzo", which achieved cult-film status during his presidency.

During his film career, he met both his wives, actresses Jane Wyman and Nancy Davis. He and Wyman had a daughter, Maureen, and adopted a son, Michael. The second marriage produced another daughter, Patricia, and a son, Ronald.

Reagan, a liberal Democrat and admirer of Franklin D Roosevelt, converted to conservatism in the Cold War era of the early 1950s. In 1964 he entered politics as a Goldwater supporter. He won terms as governor of California in 1966 and 1970 - a path later followed by another sunny, charismatic Hollywood celebrity, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Reagan lost to Richard Nixon in a bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968, and in 1976 fell just short of wresting it from the Republican incumbent, Gerald Ford.

He kept trying and thrashed President Carter in 1980.

His candidacy profited from low national morale caused partly by the Iran hostage crisis, in which Muslim militants held 52 Americans hostage for over a year despite Carter's efforts to free them. They were released as Reagan took his oath of office.

In retrospect, that seems the dawning of a radical Muslim force that now shapes America's international horizons, and the Middle East was a particular challenge for Reagan, too. The periodic seizing of American hostages in Lebanon led him into the Iran-Contra crisis. A guerrilla bomb killed 239 US servicemen during an abortive peace mission in Beirut in 1983.

A busy foreign policy

Reagan made good a threat to retaliate against "terrorists" by ordering air strikes on Libya in April 1986.

He protected Gulf oil-shipping lanes during the Iran-Iraq war by having warships escort US-flagged Kuwaiti tankers.

To Americans, his most popular foreign policy success was an invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada in October 1983. It ousted a Marxist regime and rescued stranded Americans.

On the domestic front, he scored victory after victory in Congress during his first term. After pushing through the largest tax cuts in US history - 25 per cent over three years - in 1981, Reagan saw America emerge from its worst recession since World War II. Inflation fell sharply.

But federal budget deficits mushroomed to then-astronomical $US200-billion-plus annual levels by the mid-1980s - although that seems modest next to the far greater deficits rung up later under George W Bush, the son of Reagan's successor.

Reagan's last political hurrah came in 1984, when he scored the biggest electoral landslide in US history, winning 525 of a possible 538 votes in the Electoral College and sweeping 49 of 50 states against liberal Democrat Walter Mondale.

Only after he achieved many of his economic and military goals did his political magic desert him. The Republicans lost their Senate majority in the 1986 election, and a Democratic Congress reined in such Reagan programs as "Star Wars" missile-defence research and aid to Nicaragua's Contra rebels.

Finally he was thrust into his gravest crisis with the disclosure in November 1986 that the United States had sold arms to Iran in 1985-86 and diverted proceeds to the Contras.

Congressional hearings in 1987 backed Reagan on one central point: witnesses said he was never told about the Contra funds diversion. But the hearings also portrayed an out-of-control White House and an out-of-touch president, whose zealous aides made major foreign policy moves on their own.

Reagan himself always insisted he was guilty of nothing but poor judgment.